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Simple way to share your terminal session on a call

41 points by borisandcrispin ↗ HN
We are building GitDuck, a video chat tool for developers and one of the features we needed the most was to be able to share our terminal between ourselves. We didn't like the idea of sharing the screen, as it's not fast or interactive and tmux was too complex for many use cases.

We built a terminal integration that enables you to easily share your terminal session with anyone that is talking with you on a GitDuck call.

You can share by just typing on your terminal:

  $ gitduck share
If you need to give write access to your colleagues, you can share with:

  $ gitduck share -w
All the connections are P2P (with WebRTC) and encrypted, so nothing touches our servers.

If you want to see it in action, check the video demo or install and try it live. :)

- GitDuck on npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/gitduck

- Our website: https://gitduck.com

- Video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t1MMi4QReU

Let us know what you think and why (or why not) would you use this when you need to talk and collaborate.

thanks!

19 comments

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CedarMills
Really interesting! How does it differ from using something like Zoom?
borisandcrispin
It's really built for the use cases that we face when developing software. It has direct integrations to your IDE and terminal, so you can share your code and collaborate with people (without having to combine a lot of different tools for the job).

It also works cross-IDE, so you can be using VSCode and your colleague IntelliJ and that's fine.

misterhtmlcss
I use it for help/teach my students, mentoring and for code reviews/Technical Interviews.

It's been very useful for me.

arran-nz
This looks really great, I'd love to use it.

I see you've linked to a Github account but I didn't see any source for the cli or WebApp.

Are you considering releasing the source code under a free and open source license?

arran-nz
Sorry, I've found your extension released under GPLv3.

https://github.com/gitduckhq/vscode-extension

I notice it's archived, Is ongoing development located somewhere else?

borisandcrispin
The previous version of our extension for VSCode was open source, but some months ago we rebuilt GitDuck and this new version is not. We have been thinking how do it (and if we should do it), but no decision yet.
arran-nz
Personally, not being able to view the source of an tool designed to remotely execute shell commands is a deal breaker for me.

I like what you've built, it solves a problem in a neat way - Would love to see this going the free and open source route.

ariosto
This is beautiful work. Good job!
qq4
What about tmux did you find complex?
borisandcrispin
There’s a lot of stuff to do and configure. You need to set up ssh forwarding and some times it may mean configuring firewalls, ssh keys, or VMs/servers.

GitDuck is just one command, the other peers don’t need to do/install anything and very easy to control permissions (read only vs read+write)

qq4
Those are good points. Sometimes after I've done something nontrivial I treat it as the opposite and forget how difficult it might have been.